FOX is the worst at this. Their headlines for almost an entire week was "killer automatic doors" and "if your car falls into the river, what do you do?".
You mean WFXT was stopped running stories about "Ally McBeal" and "Boston Public?" Hmm, and there was that big piece on the X-Men movie, for no particular reason... I can't wait to learn more about the new FOX shows and FOX movies on FOX news!
Try listening to WBZ 1030 - they do fairly good news coverage too. Plus the "vague news" ad is hilareous. ("A very important event effecting a large number of people occured at a certain time today. In traffic, a large number of cars are moving very slowly on a certain road. In buisness, a number of people are making a lot of money. In sports, half the teams won, the other half lost." Then they start actually pitching WBZ, but the ad is pretty funny.)
The one problem I have with the PS controller is that there's an extra set of shoulder buttons. It actually depends on the game how useful they are, though - I found them quite easy to use in MGS where the top button activated/deactivated either an item/weapon, and the bottom button brought up a menu of items/weapons. The items menu was on the left side of the screen, so the left shoulder buttons did that, and the weapons menu was on the right of the screen, so they were used by the right shoulder buttons.
Then there's Tomb Raider where each of the four shoulder buttons does something different... Walk is the top right-hand button, I think, you look with bottom-left (maybe)... And then there was Armored Core, the top buttons straifed, and the bottom buttons looked up/down !? (I think left was down...)
A lot of the usefulness of the controller depends on the games - the DualShock is nice because it fits nicely in my hands and most games are written to take proper advantage of it. Besides, it's not a far stretch from the old SNES controller, so it really doesn't require relearning. Controllers shouldn't take long times to learn.
It's more like Nintendo is feverently hoping all the developers they've managed to piss off will be willing to come back. They've managed to lose some pretty big developers (the two that come to mind are Squaresoft and Capcom). You'll notice that almost all the major Nintendo games are made by either Nintendo or a developer that they own. The best example is Rare which has created some of the best Nintendo games dating back to the Super Nintendo is owned by Nintendo.
Nintendo needs to get some of their developers back - I bought a PS because Square moved over to it for the Final Fantasy series. (Too bad they left out all the things that made FF fun in both VII and VIII, they better do IX right!)
Plus the desision to stick with cartridges really lost them some of the better games - 350MB compared with basically infinite (because you can swap CDs) lost them Square.
They want to make sure the developers will be willing to develope for them at all - a console without developers isn't very useful. Imagine what would have happened to Linux if no one was willing to write new code for it.
Knowing Nintendo, it probably does - the GameBoy Color came in Grape (standard color), Blueberry, Lime, Lemon, and Raspberry. And a Transparent color. Almost all of these colors were released about a month after the initial GameBoy Color release.
...Sony's DualShock? I've found that the Dual Shock controller is one of the nicest controllers I've ever used, it's got about the right weight, and the controls are all placed right where your thumbs/fingers are. I'd have to get a better picture, but that controller does not look like it would be very easy to use...
Granted, the DualShock would be impossible to use if the people making the controller forget that you can only use the d-pad(directional pad)/left-stick or the buttons(/\ [] O X)/right-stick - but most games keep that in mind (because they also are compatible with the standard controller).
First of all, putting the d-pad where they did seems like a bad idea to me - but I'd have to have the controller in my hand first. I find that my thumbs "work" just about right for the button-use position and the stick-use position on the DualShock - I'm not sure that I'd find myself being able to use the Nintendo controller quite as easily. Although they're probably hoping that all the games will support the analog control as opposed to the d-pad. I'm not sure what they're thinking with the shoulder buttons, either - I think there's only one of each. I wonder if the parts where you'd grip the controller (the white lines sticking down) will have "Z-trigger" like things on them?
The buttons do NOT look like they'd work well with most games - I wonder how easy it would be to play Mario on that thing? The C-buttons worked on the N64 controller because they were not in the middle of the A and B buttons - and they were nicely arranged to make using them somewhat easier.
As always, the start button is in a location that's not overly easy to use, but the DualShock has that problem too (I'd move them closer to the d-pad and the buttons, but...)
All in all, I think I still perfer the DualShock as a control over any other console controller. I wonder if the new Nintendo controller has force-feedback? Force-feedback can be really nice in some games - the controller jerking in your hands when being discovered in Metal Gear Solid is enough to make you jump. Games just don't play the same without it - and Sony did a good thing with the "dual" part, there are two different types of shaking the controller can do - the rumble pack for the N64 seems to have only had one way. Having the motors powered off the PlayStation and not a battery was nice as well.
I'll have to actually get a controller in my hand before deciding, though - I didn't like the look of the N64 controller either, but it turns out to be fairly usable.
I've been through something like 25 pages of Google results on "Ed Curry" but I have yet to find anything that explains what MS did to him - only things along the lines of (in order of frequency):
That be brought to light that WinNT 4.0 as of SP4 wasn't C2 certified, and somewhat less frequently, that the DOD didn't care. (And, as far as I know, still doesn't! The company I work for does computer/electronic related consulting for the various armed forces, so the standard desktop here is supposed to match the standard desktop (including software) of the armed forces. It is still, as of this date, AFAIK, WinNT SP4. The other interesting tidbit is that almost everyone here hates MS...)
His company, LSEC (? - it didn't even mention the name!) went bankrupt, and he blaimed MS. (Although no facts supporting the truth of this claim are given!)
He's dead. (Usually nothing more than that - just that he died. One page states a stroke, possible caused by stress - nothing more.)
This is all kind of disheartening - 250 results, not a one really gives any information about what several people claim MS did to this man. And the only page that really mentioned his the cause of his death mentioned it because his lawsuit against MS was dropped because of it!
I was hoping that the IWETHEY users could give links to the archives, since I couldn't find anything after a fairly quick look - I concentrated more on the Google search. It's kind of sad that there doesn't seem to be anything on the web explaining what MS did - maybe someone should write something.
Can you give specifics? You say MS treated him poorly and offer some examples, can you give actual evidense? Maybe a link to archives in the forums? It's all just too... vague. More specific information would be really nice.
Actually, in my case, I did remove the old drivers (before shutting down to install new things). The only thing is that when upgrading motherboard/CPU, it's next to impossible to attempt to find all the drivers that rely on the existing motherboard. The other time I broke it, I installed a new IDE harddrive. (Really.) Both times required re-installs. It's also necessary to reinstall Windows from time-to-time to flush out the registry and all the crap that slowly builds up.
Actually, I spelled it wrong correcting you (heh heh) - Cheetham is pelled - well, Cheetham. I've inverted an A and an E... Oops:-) Stupid webcam doesn't work under Mozilla either, but that's not really a very large concern. (It works under Netscape 4.73, though.)
Though it seems like they're finally getting over their censorship rants.
No, not really - they've just watched the success of more mature games and realized that the 10-and-under croud doesn't have the most money, while the 21-26 croud is the most profitible group to pander to. Basically they finally realized that being a "family game company" was hurting them, so they gave up on that and are allowing the rest of the audiance a chance to play games on their system - after all, if they don't, others will, and Nintendo stands to lose big time...
my gaming-nut friends tell me that the signal to noise ratio is substantially better with other platforms.
You're right, they are nuts. Actually, Nintendo consoles usually have a much better S:N ratio than the other consoles - but also, they often have far fewer games. Say that we can quantitize the Nintedo as producing one excellent game (signal) for every four poor games (noise). Say the PlayStation gets only one good game for every 10 games. (IE, S:N is 1:9, but that makes it a nice 10% good, 90% "other.")
The problem is that the PlayStation will have 100 games in a certain time period, while the Nintendo may get around 20. 100x10% = 10, 20x20%=4, so by this "example" the PlayStation has 10 good games and the Nintendo only has four...
This is, of course, an over-simplification, but there are many really bad games for the PlayStation - far more than for the Nintendo. There are just more games for the PS. Nintendo needs to get back some of the developers they managed to lose, most noticibly Capcom and Squaresoft. Some of the best SNES games where by those two, and their "defecting" to the PlayStation was a real hurt to the N64's success.
Not to mention that the great hardware of the N64 was severely hurt by the really crappy media used to store games - something like a max space of 350MB. Final Fantasy VII was something like 1.5 GB, spanning 3 CDs. VIII approached 2 GB with 4 CDs if I recall correctly. But these were "cinimatic" games, so the CG probably hurt them - then again, MGS which contained very few CG sequences and was mostly done through an ingame rendering system weighed in around 1 GB on 2 CDs with all the audio it had, not to mention the superior music.
The bottom line is that even if the tech specs seem superior, a console is only as strong as it's weakest link - it remains to be seen if the Dolphin will be as good as the PS2, the X-Box, or the Dreamcast. There are many things that go into a good console, the hardware is just one variable among many.
But seriously, although I'm sure that the delicate interplay of personalities was brought about by having everyone there, physically, can't you all just call in and record that way?
First of all, having them call in and record is going to sound terrible - phones just don't sound that nice! However, it should still be possible for them to somehow contact each other to record an episode. Since this is, of course, Geeks in Space (Linux Geeks, to be specific), an Internet solution somehow involving Linux is, of course, preferred.
So that's why I'd suggest that they look for GPLed software that allows high quality audio to be streamed over the web so they can colaborate together for the show. It's gotta be something hi-tech, something as old as phones just isn't gonna cut it for GiS. If there isn't anything currently available to allow realtime audio streaming over the web, licenced under the GPL, and designed for Linux, then someone needs to get to work!:)
Either that, or they should invest in some video conferencing equipment - damn the cost, they sure look cool. (Plus it's fun to play with the cameras remotely... zoom-in, zoom-out - start it roaming randomly...)
What ever they do, it needs to be hi-tech, and it needs to be geeky. After all, it wouldn't be Geeks in Space if they were using something old-fassioned like the telephone. Those things should be obsolete soon! Streaming audio over the Internet, all the way!
While they do that, they could fix the color schemes for the Geeks in Space section so that visited and non-visited links are maybe different colors - damn, this black-on-white scheme looks ugly.
No way in hell anyone can see that in the image you linked to - try the much larger 1600x1200 version, the BSD daemon and the B in BDS are clearly visible.
I'll have to take your word that that is who you say it is...
Thanks for that link, it rather proves my point...
...and although the First Congress enacted our initial copyright statute, Act of May 31, 1790, 1 Stat. 124, without any explicit reference to "fair use," as it later came to be known...
Cool, so a judge agrees with my reading of the Constitution. Also note that the First Amendment does not touch on copyright issues. It does not touch on "fair use" at all.
Thus expressed, fair use remained exclusively judge-made doctrine until the passage of the 1976 Copyright Act...
Sorry, but Congressional laws override case law. (Except when a judge rules a law unconstitutional.) In other words, you've given an example of case law which basically proves that although fair use has been used by the courts for the past many years, it still isn't actually a guarenteed right. It can be taken away through legislation.
I'm gonna guess that you're behind a firewall. If that's the case, then it won't work. (Well, it will work on sites inside the firewall, but not outside.) I've got it running on NT4 SP6 behind a firewall, although I can't access Slashdot or anything through a proxy - you can't access the configuration settings. I'll have to fool around with it later, see if I can get proxy settings up and running. Looks nice, though.
I dunno what your problem was, my new PC came with Windows already installed - have any problems, stick in a CD, and everything is reset...
The point here is that most people don't install Windows - they get the PC and it's already there. All the drivers are already there. Everything is set up to work out of the box. If anything goes wrong, they call their PC manufactorers tech. support, and get told to insert the red CD labeled "rescue" and get walked through the automated restore of the disk image.
If you like to upgrade, though, then Windows is not the OS for you - my Linux install has survived all the hardware upgrades, while Windows usually craps out after an upgrade, forcing a complete reinstall. (Did you know that: If the Windows upgrade version causes a "segmentation fault" (yes, that's what it read) that you then need to go and obtain a Full Install license? Because it will leave your FAT32 system in an unbootable state (sorta - LILO won't have been overwritten, if installed, yet) - and the installer will refuse to "upgrade" the system because it corrupted the system files it checks to make sure the "upgrade" is OK.)
Frankenboxes aren't MS's target platform - it's those boxes sold by Gateway and Compaq and Dell that they're insterested in. Upgrades to those usually go through upgrade centers where the new hardware has already been tested.
Actually, fair use isn't protected by the constitution - sorry. The relevant portion of the constitution reads "[Congress is granted the power t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries[.]" That does not imply fair use. A copy of the constitution can be read online, the relevant section is here. As far as I can tell, there are no other portions of the Constitution guarenteeing fair use.
Copyright is granted in the Constitution, and some case has already upheld that Congress can increase the time of copyright as far into the future as they like, and that any restrictions on "fair use" are legal.
OK - Don't (or, more accurately, didn't) know the situation in Germany, but $30-$50/month is about the cost of DSL in the US, I think. The bottom line is that we don't know what the servers were doing. The other inaccuracy in these stastics is that we also don't know how many of the servers being detected are actually firewalls etc.
But if it's prohibitively expensive to have private Linux boxes set up, the figure suggests that Linux boxes are being used more often by companies - but doesn't actually prove it.
Hehe - glad I live on campus, where I can get a 100Mbit ethernet connection which eventually makes it to the Internet over multiple T1 lines. (Eventually, a T3 line will be added... T3 line to be installed by mid-January, 2000! Pushed back from mid-October, 1999. I wonder if they got it in over the summer semester...)
He should be setting aside his personal biases towards 2600's reputation.
No, actually, he shouldn't. 2600's intent in distributing DeCSS was the main issue. Was DeCSS to be used for playing DVDs or copying them? That was the core issue, and given 2600's reputation, the judge decided that the intent was to copy. Their reputation was important to decide the intent. If Signal 11 were on trial to determine if he posted content in an attempt to bolster his karma, his reputation would hurt him. Same idea applies to 2600. If Microsoft said that they fully supported open source, would you believe them? Reputation is important and a valid bias in court cases - that's what character witnesses are for.
Personally, I think Ketzer hit the nail on the head with his post - sounds to me like Ketzer does indeed get it!
The encryption was a trade secret which is more or less fair game once the cat's out of the bag.
And then there's the fun part - the encryption was actually a content control mechanism. That is protected under the DCMA.
Whether the result was right or wrong is a moral question - it can be argued endlessly. (And I haven't formed a concrete opinion myself.) Personally, though, I think that the outcome of the trial was legally correct, and that 2600 will lose in the long run.
Another good book about the history of computers is called The Devouring Fungus. It's got a good collection of actual history and urban legend (or maybe net legend would be more accurate?).
So the concept of "fair use" is now officially dead. Two-hundred years of constitutional protection down the crapper. This is the scariest thing I believe I've ever read....
Uh, the Consitution does not guarantee fair use. In fact, the Consitution would allow Congress to give the MPAA a monopoly on content for a billion years, if they wanted to. "Fair use" was created by Congress, and is not a guarenteed right. Copyright, on the other hand, is an enumerated power, and Congress can do whatever they like with that. Fair use is something nice - they could remove that if they wanted to.
Now that's scary.
(Congress is given the right to create copyright in the oft-quoted Article I, Section 8 of the United States Consitution. The relevant enumerated power reads "[Congress is granted the power t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries[.]" and can be read here.)
So then should we discount Microsoft Windows market share on the desktop because most of the home users, after buying their computers, have it collecting dust in the corner somewhere after the novelty wears off?
I think I understand what you mean - that those computers are indeed valid in the context of boxes running x OS based on IP. However, it's not valid considering that we're supposed to assume that they all are servers - I wonder how many are boxes left running so the user can SSH in to gain access to his or her files?
Once you have your statistics, you can draw so many conclusions based on them - the fact that this was posted to what amounts to a Linux advocacy site suggests that Hemos believes that these figures prove something about Linux. (As does the telling the-penguins-wins-the- dept.)
Useful statistics in determining the "best" OS for something might be the OSes that e-commerce sites with 24/7 uptime, sustained for a year, use. But that won't tell anything about which OS is actually "best," it only says that a certain OS is good for the circumstances. I wouldn't run a mission-critical website on Windows. I also wouldn't run it on Linux - I'd use something like OpenVMS (only one that comes to mind right now).
Solaris has its place, Linux does too. These statistics don't really say anything about Linux, other than it's used on boxes that are connected to the Internet long enough to be port-scanned. So what? It doesn't really suggest anything about Linux - other than it's being used in Germany.
Actually, that's actually "American" not English. 1E15 turns out to be quadrillion in America, and confusingly enough, one-thousand billion in the British system. You can learn FMTYNTK about the names of big numbers courtesy of Merriam-Webster.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean WFXT was stopped running stories about "Ally McBeal" and "Boston Public?" Hmm, and there was that big piece on the X-Men movie, for no particular reason... I can't wait to learn more about the new FOX shows and FOX movies on FOX news!
Try listening to WBZ 1030 - they do fairly good news coverage too. Plus the "vague news" ad is hilareous. ("A very important event effecting a large number of people occured at a certain time today. In traffic, a large number of cars are moving very slowly on a certain road. In buisness, a number of people are making a lot of money. In sports, half the teams won, the other half lost." Then they start actually pitching WBZ, but the ad is pretty funny.)
Then there's Tomb Raider where each of the four shoulder buttons does something different... Walk is the top right-hand button, I think, you look with bottom-left (maybe)... And then there was Armored Core, the top buttons straifed, and the bottom buttons looked up/down !? (I think left was down...)
A lot of the usefulness of the controller depends on the games - the DualShock is nice because it fits nicely in my hands and most games are written to take proper advantage of it. Besides, it's not a far stretch from the old SNES controller, so it really doesn't require relearning. Controllers shouldn't take long times to learn.
Nintendo needs to get some of their developers back - I bought a PS because Square moved over to it for the Final Fantasy series. (Too bad they left out all the things that made FF fun in both VII and VIII, they better do IX right!)
Plus the desision to stick with cartridges really lost them some of the better games - 350MB compared with basically infinite (because you can swap CDs) lost them Square.
They want to make sure the developers will be willing to develope for them at all - a console without developers isn't very useful. Imagine what would have happened to Linux if no one was willing to write new code for it.
Knowing Nintendo, it probably does - the GameBoy Color came in Grape (standard color), Blueberry, Lime, Lemon, and Raspberry. And a Transparent color. Almost all of these colors were released about a month after the initial GameBoy Color release.
Granted, the DualShock would be impossible to use if the people making the controller forget that you can only use the d-pad(directional pad)/left-stick or the buttons(/\ [] O X)/right-stick - but most games keep that in mind (because they also are compatible with the standard controller).
First of all, putting the d-pad where they did seems like a bad idea to me - but I'd have to have the controller in my hand first. I find that my thumbs "work" just about right for the button-use position and the stick-use position on the DualShock - I'm not sure that I'd find myself being able to use the Nintendo controller quite as easily. Although they're probably hoping that all the games will support the analog control as opposed to the d-pad. I'm not sure what they're thinking with the shoulder buttons, either - I think there's only one of each. I wonder if the parts where you'd grip the controller (the white lines sticking down) will have "Z-trigger" like things on them?
The buttons do NOT look like they'd work well with most games - I wonder how easy it would be to play Mario on that thing? The C-buttons worked on the N64 controller because they were not in the middle of the A and B buttons - and they were nicely arranged to make using them somewhat easier.
As always, the start button is in a location that's not overly easy to use, but the DualShock has that problem too (I'd move them closer to the d-pad and the buttons, but...)
All in all, I think I still perfer the DualShock as a control over any other console controller. I wonder if the new Nintendo controller has force-feedback? Force-feedback can be really nice in some games - the controller jerking in your hands when being discovered in Metal Gear Solid is enough to make you jump. Games just don't play the same without it - and Sony did a good thing with the "dual" part, there are two different types of shaking the controller can do - the rumble pack for the N64 seems to have only had one way. Having the motors powered off the PlayStation and not a battery was nice as well.
I'll have to actually get a controller in my hand before deciding, though - I didn't like the look of the N64 controller either, but it turns out to be fairly usable.
This is all kind of disheartening - 250 results, not a one really gives any information about what several people claim MS did to this man. And the only page that really mentioned his the cause of his death mentioned it because his lawsuit against MS was dropped because of it!
I was hoping that the IWETHEY users could give links to the archives, since I couldn't find anything after a fairly quick look - I concentrated more on the Google search. It's kind of sad that there doesn't seem to be anything on the web explaining what MS did - maybe someone should write something.
Can you give specifics? You say MS treated him poorly and offer some examples, can you give actual evidense? Maybe a link to archives in the forums? It's all just too... vague. More specific information would be really nice.
Actually, in my case, I did remove the old drivers (before shutting down to install new things). The only thing is that when upgrading motherboard/CPU, it's next to impossible to attempt to find all the drivers that rely on the existing motherboard. The other time I broke it, I installed a new IDE harddrive. (Really.) Both times required re-installs. It's also necessary to reinstall Windows from time-to-time to flush out the registry and all the crap that slowly builds up.
Actually, I spelled it wrong correcting you (heh heh) - Cheetham is pelled - well, Cheetham. I've inverted an A and an E... Oops :-) Stupid webcam doesn't work under Mozilla either, but that's not really a very large concern. (It works under Netscape 4.73, though.)
No, not really - they've just watched the success of more mature games and realized that the 10-and-under croud doesn't have the most money, while the 21-26 croud is the most profitible group to pander to. Basically they finally realized that being a "family game company" was hurting them, so they gave up on that and are allowing the rest of the audiance a chance to play games on their system - after all, if they don't, others will, and Nintendo stands to lose big time...
It's actually "Dewey, Cheatem, & Howe", you can see the window out there office through a webcam. Really.
Wait - cool! Icecast, huh? Maybe they can look into it... sounds like it would be perfect for GiS...
(Either that, or my &^(%ing SB Live! Platinum card to work under Linux... Yes, I've installed the Emu10k module, no it doesn't work right (yet).)
You're right, they are nuts. Actually, Nintendo consoles usually have a much better S:N ratio than the other consoles - but also, they often have far fewer games. Say that we can quantitize the Nintedo as producing one excellent game (signal) for every four poor games (noise). Say the PlayStation gets only one good game for every 10 games. (IE, S:N is 1:9, but that makes it a nice 10% good, 90% "other.")
The problem is that the PlayStation will have 100 games in a certain time period, while the Nintendo may get around 20. 100x10% = 10, 20x20%=4, so by this "example" the PlayStation has 10 good games and the Nintendo only has four...
This is, of course, an over-simplification, but there are many really bad games for the PlayStation - far more than for the Nintendo. There are just more games for the PS. Nintendo needs to get back some of the developers they managed to lose, most noticibly Capcom and Squaresoft. Some of the best SNES games where by those two, and their "defecting" to the PlayStation was a real hurt to the N64's success.
Not to mention that the great hardware of the N64 was severely hurt by the really crappy media used to store games - something like a max space of 350MB. Final Fantasy VII was something like 1.5 GB, spanning 3 CDs. VIII approached 2 GB with 4 CDs if I recall correctly. But these were "cinimatic" games, so the CG probably hurt them - then again, MGS which contained very few CG sequences and was mostly done through an ingame rendering system weighed in around 1 GB on 2 CDs with all the audio it had, not to mention the superior music.
The bottom line is that even if the tech specs seem superior, a console is only as strong as it's weakest link - it remains to be seen if the Dolphin will be as good as the PS2, the X-Box, or the Dreamcast. There are many things that go into a good console, the hardware is just one variable among many.
First of all, having them call in and record is going to sound terrible - phones just don't sound that nice! However, it should still be possible for them to somehow contact each other to record an episode. Since this is, of course, Geeks in Space (Linux Geeks, to be specific), an Internet solution somehow involving Linux is, of course, preferred.
So that's why I'd suggest that they look for GPLed software that allows high quality audio to be streamed over the web so they can colaborate together for the show. It's gotta be something hi-tech, something as old as phones just isn't gonna cut it for GiS. If there isn't anything currently available to allow realtime audio streaming over the web, licenced under the GPL, and designed for Linux, then someone needs to get to work! :)
Either that, or they should invest in some video conferencing equipment - damn the cost, they sure look cool. (Plus it's fun to play with the cameras remotely... zoom-in, zoom-out - start it roaming randomly...)
What ever they do, it needs to be hi-tech, and it needs to be geeky. After all, it wouldn't be Geeks in Space if they were using something old-fassioned like the telephone. Those things should be obsolete soon! Streaming audio over the Internet, all the way!
While they do that, they could fix the color schemes for the Geeks in Space section so that visited and non-visited links are maybe different colors - damn, this black-on-white scheme looks ugly.
I'll have to take your word that that is who you say it is...
Cool, so a judge agrees with my reading of the Constitution. Also note that the First Amendment does not touch on copyright issues. It does not touch on "fair use" at all.
Thus expressed, fair use remained exclusively judge-made doctrine until the passage of the 1976 Copyright Act...
Sorry, but Congressional laws override case law. (Except when a judge rules a law unconstitutional.) In other words, you've given an example of case law which basically proves that although fair use has been used by the courts for the past many years, it still isn't actually a guarenteed right. It can be taken away through legislation.
I'm gonna guess that you're behind a firewall. If that's the case, then it won't work. (Well, it will work on sites inside the firewall, but not outside.) I've got it running on NT4 SP6 behind a firewall, although I can't access Slashdot or anything through a proxy - you can't access the configuration settings. I'll have to fool around with it later, see if I can get proxy settings up and running. Looks nice, though.
The point here is that most people don't install Windows - they get the PC and it's already there. All the drivers are already there. Everything is set up to work out of the box. If anything goes wrong, they call their PC manufactorers tech. support, and get told to insert the red CD labeled "rescue" and get walked through the automated restore of the disk image.
If you like to upgrade, though, then Windows is not the OS for you - my Linux install has survived all the hardware upgrades, while Windows usually craps out after an upgrade, forcing a complete reinstall. (Did you know that: If the Windows upgrade version causes a "segmentation fault" (yes, that's what it read) that you then need to go and obtain a Full Install license? Because it will leave your FAT32 system in an unbootable state (sorta - LILO won't have been overwritten, if installed, yet) - and the installer will refuse to "upgrade" the system because it corrupted the system files it checks to make sure the "upgrade" is OK.)
Frankenboxes aren't MS's target platform - it's those boxes sold by Gateway and Compaq and Dell that they're insterested in. Upgrades to those usually go through upgrade centers where the new hardware has already been tested.
Copyright is granted in the Constitution, and some case has already upheld that Congress can increase the time of copyright as far into the future as they like, and that any restrictions on "fair use" are legal.
But if it's prohibitively expensive to have private Linux boxes set up, the figure suggests that Linux boxes are being used more often by companies - but doesn't actually prove it.
Hehe - glad I live on campus, where I can get a 100Mbit ethernet connection which eventually makes it to the Internet over multiple T1 lines. (Eventually, a T3 line will be added... T3 line to be installed by mid-January, 2000! Pushed back from mid-October, 1999. I wonder if they got it in over the summer semester...)
No, actually, he shouldn't. 2600's intent in distributing DeCSS was the main issue. Was DeCSS to be used for playing DVDs or copying them? That was the core issue, and given 2600's reputation, the judge decided that the intent was to copy. Their reputation was important to decide the intent. If Signal 11 were on trial to determine if he posted content in an attempt to bolster his karma, his reputation would hurt him. Same idea applies to 2600. If Microsoft said that they fully supported open source, would you believe them? Reputation is important and a valid bias in court cases - that's what character witnesses are for.
Personally, I think Ketzer hit the nail on the head with his post - sounds to me like Ketzer does indeed get it!
The encryption was a trade secret which is more or less fair game once the cat's out of the bag.
And then there's the fun part - the encryption was actually a content control mechanism. That is protected under the DCMA.
Whether the result was right or wrong is a moral question - it can be argued endlessly. (And I haven't formed a concrete opinion myself.) Personally, though, I think that the outcome of the trial was legally correct, and that 2600 will lose in the long run.
Another good book about the history of computers is called The Devouring Fungus . It's got a good collection of actual history and urban legend (or maybe net legend would be more accurate?).
Uh, the Consitution does not guarantee fair use. In fact, the Consitution would allow Congress to give the MPAA a monopoly on content for a billion years, if they wanted to. "Fair use" was created by Congress, and is not a guarenteed right. Copyright, on the other hand, is an enumerated power, and Congress can do whatever they like with that. Fair use is something nice - they could remove that if they wanted to.
Now that's scary.
(Congress is given the right to create copyright in the oft-quoted Article I, Section 8 of the United States Consitution. The relevant enumerated power reads "[Congress is granted the power t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries[.]" and can be read here.)
I think I understand what you mean - that those computers are indeed valid in the context of boxes running x OS based on IP. However, it's not valid considering that we're supposed to assume that they all are servers - I wonder how many are boxes left running so the user can SSH in to gain access to his or her files?
Once you have your statistics, you can draw so many conclusions based on them - the fact that this was posted to what amounts to a Linux advocacy site suggests that Hemos believes that these figures prove something about Linux. (As does the telling the-penguins-wins-the- dept.)
Useful statistics in determining the "best" OS for something might be the OSes that e-commerce sites with 24/7 uptime, sustained for a year, use. But that won't tell anything about which OS is actually "best," it only says that a certain OS is good for the circumstances. I wouldn't run a mission-critical website on Windows. I also wouldn't run it on Linux - I'd use something like OpenVMS (only one that comes to mind right now).
Solaris has its place, Linux does too. These statistics don't really say anything about Linux, other than it's used on boxes that are connected to the Internet long enough to be port-scanned. So what? It doesn't really suggest anything about Linux - other than it's being used in Germany.
1 million = 1E6
1 billion = 1E9
1 trillion = 1E12
1 ? = 1E15
Actually, that's actually "American" not English. 1E15 turns out to be quadrillion in America, and confusingly enough, one-thousand billion in the British system. You can learn FMTYNTK about the names of big numbers courtesy of Merriam-Webster.